I am Vlad Tenev, the founder of Robinhood.
We're talking about Robinhood. The stock's more than doubled since his last report.
Stock surged 180% this year after nearly doubling in 2024.
The shares of the trading platform now up more than 400% in the last year.
Vlad, your presence there speaks volumes. Robinhood Gold, which hit a record 3.5 million subscribers.
Most financial services get worse the more money you have, but we wanted to kind of invert that.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev.
My guy.
Good to see you, brother.
Chamath, good to see you.
Good to see you.
Vlad, it's so good to see you. You're the reason Jake is here.
I mean, it is a great story.
It's so true. Jake bumbled into eight shares of Robinhood. Vlad built a hundred billion dollar company. It's unbelievable.
I mean, people know me for the Uber investment which was four or five million dollar valuation, but...
When do I flip that?
Well, yeah, it's going to take a little more. I think you got 20X left to go, but...
Wait, what was Jake the third or fourth investor in Robinhood?
It was 20 million dollar valuation. But it's a good story I think because you hadn't launched. And we're at Antonio's nut house. I went for a drink with my friend Adeyemi. He brought his college roommate Elon. We're hanging out at Antonio's nut house in Palo Alto. Rest in peace, Antonio. So Vlad comes over. We Vlad and I knew each other a little bit, and Vlad pitches me on this idea, and he says, 'I'm a quant.' I said, 'What's a quant?' He said, 'Quantitative analysis.' I said, 'Yeah, I heard of it. Hit me with the idea.' And then he goes, 'Is that Elon Musk?' I said, 'Yeah. Just hit me with the idea. I got to start up.' He says, 'Well, I want to get this generation, these millennials, these Gen Zs, I want to get them to trade stocks.' I said, 'Love it.' 'They don't care about like getting a driver's license. They don't, they're still on their mom and dad's Netflix. You're going to try to get people who don't care about the future to trade stocks.' He says, 'Yeah.' I said, 'What's the business model?' He said, 'That's the best part. We're going to let them trade for free.' So, I said, 'Okay, let me repeat this back to you, kid. You want to get a group of people who don't have any interest in the future to trade stocks and then...
We have 30 seconds left.
...make money. You're going to make money.
Thank you, Vlad.
I mean, thanks, Vlad. Bravo.
I said, 'I'm in.'
Okay.
I'm in.
Not only that, but he said, 'This is probably the best idea you'll ever have.'
I did say that to him, too. I was like, 'This is the best idea. What if it works?' And here we are 10 years later, what's worked?
Week, you're added to the S&P 500.
Last week or yesterday? 2 days ago.
I mean, what a huge accomplishment.
I mean, I'm pretty sure...
I think it was because I rejected you for a job, right?
It is a tale of two cities.
Thank you guys for upgrading me, by the way. I guess that's been the best part of being added to the S&P, going from just Jason interview to the whole squad here.
We were doing the rehearsal yesterday, and everyone wanted to do the interview, so we said, 'Let's all do it together.'
'Why don't we all get in here?'
Can I, let's maybe start. So, look, you built an incredible business. There's a part of it that looks like the, you know, what comes after the E*TRADE of the world, etc. But there's an enormous other part of your business, and there's all these emerging paths. I want to just start by double-clicking in something that you announced a few months ago in France. And maybe you want to talk us through it, what the goal was. You got a lot of support, but you got a lot of blowback, as well. There was a lot of people that were like, 'Wow, this is a little too disruptive.' Tokenizing these stocks, putting them on the blockchain. Maybe talk us through the business, and then just double-click on that narrow thing so we can understand what you're up to.
Yeah, so we had an event in the south of France that we called to catch a token. And the idea behind that event was we wanted to show what Robinhood the app, the platform would look like if it was built from the ground up on crypto technology. So, what that looked like was stocks on blockchains. Obviously, we added a bunch of crypto native features like perps. We launched in now 31 countries. And then we also wanted to demonstrate to the US what the power of putting traditional financial services on blockchains was. And to me, I think a lot of people talk about 24/7 stock trading, instant settlement, these things that do have real value, but I think the most powerful thing is taking inaccessible, illiquid assets and making them available. And so we were actually I think the first to tokenize Open AI and SpaceX. And we made that available to our retail customers in Europe in the form of a giveaway. And that was very very exciting. You know, not without its controversy, but I felt like it was such a powerful thing.
So, how do you do it? How did you enable that?
It's actually very similar to stablecoin in a way. So, if you're a stablecoin issuer, and this is a little bit oversimplifying, but you can think of it as we keep some dollars or treasuries in a bucket over here. We mint and burn tokens against that bucket, but back at one-to-one. And the tokens can actually trade publicly on a variety of blockchains. So, it's just extending that tokenization concept from stablecoins to public and private securities.
To go and secure your own block of SpaceX and Open AI stock and...
...then...
...it somewhere. Were the companies okay with it?
Um, it depends. I think a lot of people are okay with it in principle, but if you're a company and you're focused on your mission like Open AI is and you hear about some new thing, it's kind of a distraction. So, I don't really blame them for tokenization or private access not being their top priority. But, I did want to be the first to tokenize Open AI. So, I think...
I have had a couple conversations with Sam before and after, yeah.
Because yeah, he's a spicy individual. What was his take? Did he tell you to stop?
I think that actually, I'd like to think we get along quite well. I think he understood why we were doing it. Again, the distraction aspect when they have so much going on is a real thing. But, at the end of the day...
Take it from here? Are you going to go and get 50, 100 of these well-known private companies? Is that the goal? Is it every private company? How, like, what do you do from here to build on top of it?
Yeah, so we've been hard at work trying to figure out how to do it in the US. I think that's everyone's interested in that since the France announcement. Obviously, expanding what we do in Europe as well. And there'll probably be different mechanisms in the US and in Europe at least for some time. But, yeah, you should expect that we go bigger and deeper into the space and have plenty of things to do in the future.
What the relationship has been with the new administration. The last administration, you know, was not very pro-innovation, crypto. And now you got David running that specifically. How has the change in the administration changed how you look at innovation at Robinhood? And then Sax, I'm sure you have some follow-up questions here.
Yeah. It's been very positive. I mean, just by nature of how many times I've been to Washington, the last administration didn't invite me to the White House once. I asked for meetings and they wouldn't even meet in person. They were all working remotely until I think 2023, early 2024.
It was funny how remote work kind of broke down along political lines. It's sort of like the Republicans wanted to get back in the office.
You're referring to remote work as not working.
I mean, that is, I wasn't going to say it, but yeah. Yeah, it was funny how that works out. But it's been very positive. I mean, last administration we were playing a lot of defense. It was just sort of like one enforcement action and we had a Wells notice and all aspects of our business were sort of under assault. So, I think the most direct thing was when that went away, we had to think, 'Okay, well, the administration now wants to work with us rather than just trying to attack us from all these angles.' And for a while, we didn't even know how to operate in that environment because we were just completely not used to it.
Yeah, you were on your heels constantly.
Have...
I have not. No, I just receive letters from time to time, but...
She really...
She hates you. She told me personally, she really can't take it.
No, the reason I ask is what is the core motivation of the idea of we need to enforce, we need to kind of restrict, we need to prohibit? Is it consumer protection? That the belief is that systems like yours that are more open, more accessible, more usable, more consumers will trade more and potentially lose money, and therefore they have to try and play a role in restricting consumer access to these markets and these marketplaces. And that's what they're ultimately kind of driving towards. Or do you think that there's something more vested interest-wise that's motivating?
I mean, I think there's probably both. Certainly consumer protection is the stated reason, but obviously these folks have funders and backers and lots of interest. I mean, there's powerful financial services companies in the state of Massachusetts. So, I don't know what's happening behind the scenes, but you know, I do think the consumer protection angle is what they're kind of pulling out.
How do you, yeah, how do you look at this type of innovation in your role at the White House to support it and to foster it while still, you know, having some rules on the field?
Well, I think Vlad's vision around tokenization is very exciting. I like you wrote an op-ed. I think it's in the Washington Post. So, it was very good on this topic. We now have a regulatory framework in place, the Genius Act, which the president signed in July, that creates the set of rules for stable coins, which are just tokenized dollars. And like Vlad's saying, if you can tokenize a dollar, you can tokenize anything. You just basically create a reserve of that asset in a secure account at a bank somewhere or a broker, and then you mint tokens on a one-to-one basis. So, I think it's very exciting. There's no reason why we can't tokenize. Let's start with public securities. I think that's the easy case because with public companies, there's already disclosure requirements, there's an abundance of information, and anybody can buy a public security, right? Because of those disclosure requirements. And the companies don't really care who their stockholders are, right? I mean, because they know that the public owns these securities. So, what we could get right away with tokenized public securities is, like you're saying, a 24/7 global marketplace with instantaneous blockchain-based settlement. And that could be really exciting. There's no reason why trading has to be on this like 9:00 to 5:00 exchange with all this, you know, we can enable stocks to trade as easily as you, you know, transfer a stablecoin. Now, the private security part is interesting. That is, I think, more complicated because first of all, the companies, like you're saying, they do care who their shareholders are, and they do generally restrict those things, and that's why you probably got the phone call from Sam. And then the regulators care also because there's not as much public disclosure. So, there's more of an impetus to protect the public. By the way, I'm not saying we can't get there on private securities. About a decade ago, I founded a startup to tokenize real estate called Harbor, and we were just way too far ahead of the curve. But that was basically to tokenize private real estate security. So, I think we can get there, but I think the place to start that'd be really exciting would just be like let's do the public securities first because it's easy or easier from a regulatory standpoint, and then we can work our way into private.
Yeah, it's certainly easier technologically. I mean, we've made both available to some extent in the EU. I think private could be more meaningful long term, and I'll tell you why I think so. If you look at the technologies that are transforming society right now and that we feel so optimistic about over the next 5 years, it's AI and to some extent, you know, space exploration. And I think with AI in particular, there's a lot of fear right now. I mean, you talk to a random person on the street, more than half the time, they're a little bit nervous about what AI is going to do to them. Now, imagine the scenario if, you know, 20 to 30% of someone's net worth is in AI companies. Now, suddenly they're not fighting against this thing. They want it to succeed because if AI succeeds and gets better and better...
